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Synopsis:
What if your body could sense the future—or your thoughts could subtly shape the world around you? In this episode, Ky sits down with inventor and consciousness researcher Adam Curry to explore the science behind Psi phenomena. They dig into wild but well documented experiments and discuss how intention and belief might actually influence physical systems, like random number generators and even a color-shifting “mind lamp.” Adam also shares how his app Entangled is using quantum data and global participation to study collective intuition—and how AI might help us understand, not replicate, consciousness. This conversation is a fascinating look at the strange, powerful possibilities of the human mind.
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Transcript:
Hi everyone. I'm Ky Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from The Telepathy Tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities.
If you haven't yet listened to season one of The Telepathy Tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, nonspeakers and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long.
In this episode of the Talk Tracks, I sit down with Adam Curry, an inventor researcher, and all around deep thinker who spent years exploring the edges of human consciousness and Psi phenomena. We talk about wild, but well-documented experiments showing how our bodies might sense the future before it [00:01:00] happens, and how AI could actually help us understand what consciousness really is, rather than becoming conscious itself.
It's a fascinating mind-bending chat that might just change the way you see reality. Well, Adam, why don't you start by introducing yourself and how did you, you know, what are you doing in this space right now that might be of interest to people?
Adam Curry: I'm Adam Curry. I am something like an inventor, something like an armchair scientist, something like a Psi and consciousness researcher.
And I've been involved in exploring particularly psychokinesis, telepathy and so forth for about 20 years. My current focus is a project called Entangled, which you can think of as a kind of way to advance or democratize Psi research. And also thinking about the applications of, or the implications of Psi to artificial intelligence and some of the deep questions, uh, surrounding AI systems.
Ky Dickens: Wonderful. And you know, it's always interesting to find out how people got into the field of Psi [00:02:00] research. Was there an event or moment in your life that made all of this seem possible and interesting to you?
Adam Curry: When I was 15, I needed a job and I ended up going to a bookstore and I saw this book kind of pulled out of the section of books, and it was "Super Learning" by I think Sheila Ostrander and Nancy Schroeder, and I thought this book was cool.
It was all about how to accelerate your learning. I read this book and I looked at what else the authors had written, and I saw that in the late seventies they had written a book called Psychic Discoveries from Behind the Iron Curtain. So these were two journalists that were, you know, kind of doing what you are doing, but a long, long time ago in, in the Psi Research stuff.
And so I read that and uh, learned about remote viewing and this whole sci research program, which of course was really cool. A few weeks later I met a friend's dad and he started bringing up remote viewing to me. And I said, I know about that. I just read this book about it. And he said, great. Um, [00:03:00] how about you come work for me this summer?
Um, your job will be a to learn and teach yourself to code and manage my website and to learn remote viewing. And you can be like my personal remote viewer. I started going to scientific conferences that were composed of people, you know, sort of professional academics and others who are interested in the science of anomalous things.
So telepathy and the, that whole world of unexplained things and was blown away because I found that there were remarkable, um, people from very prestigious universities who had basically hit upon a treasure trove of exciting things. And so that kind of gave me purpose.
Ky Dickens: What a great story. I love it.
'cause it's really like your curiosity led you down this path from a single book. And I wanna come back to story like, we'll come back to you in a second, but I, you brought up the research that's been ignored or kind of dismissed or not even looked at, that is pretty conclusive or at least exciting. Are there any studies that have struck [00:04:00] you, that you've come across where you think, good grief, I wish everyone in the world could see this.
Or how is this not more out there? Or maybe it didn't even get published and you think that's a shame that you'd want to share?
Adam Curry: I'll tell you about one class of experiments that is particularly exciting to me right now. These are a class of experiments that you call pre sentiment studies or precognition studies, and these have been done for about the last 20 years, and it goes something like this.
If you are a psychology 1 0 1 student, one of the experiments that you often will do is looking at Galvanic skin response or like subconscious reactions that are measurable to stimuli. So you would attach some kind of measurement device to a subject's finger. Then you would randomly show images, some of which are meant to be scary or provocative.
And then, uh, what you see is this, uh, response to that where the skin conductivity increases, uh, when the provocative [00:05:00] image is shown. And so this is, this is meant to kind of get at, you know, the, the sort of subconscious level of processing in the human being. Well, uh, for the last 20 years there's been a very interesting twist on that, that some scholars have have shown, and that's measuring the body's reaction in the seconds prior to being shown a provocative image. So these, these images are chosen by a random number generator, meaning that it can't be determined and the participants are showing a highly statistically significant reaction to, uh, a shocking stimuli before it's being shown. So it's a very simple experiment.
It's very elegant, but it, I think, reveals an important. Dimension to our own biology and psychology, which is this attenuation to the immediate future. We wanted to put it in evolutionary terms. It makes perfect sense because it's an adaptive advantage. What could be more adaptive and evolutionary advantageous than reacting [00:06:00] subconsciously in the moments before a threat is presented or making decisions that somehow enable your, you know, your survival or growth as an organism.
There are other scholars who have shown that, uh, similar effects exist for animals. Alvarez, it showed that finches little birds inside a cage started to react more radically and kind of fluttering around the cage prior to being shown an image of a snake with their natural predator. There was another one concerning earthworms where they looked at the behavior of earthworms in the soil.
Just before sending sound vibrations through a big speaker through the soil and found that the, the earthworms started to move around prior to that. So in my opinion, this is kind of pointing to anomalous pre sentiment responses being something like an an evolutionary adaptive advantage.
Ky Dickens: How would you define consciousness, Adam?
Adam Curry: I appreciate the easy questions. So consciousness to me, you know, it means different things to different people. To myself, I [00:07:00] think of it as the nature of the first person perspective. So for example, there is something called what it's like to be Adam. I'm having a, an experience of being me. I have intentions, I have emotions.
I can see colors. I have different tastes and senses, and that whole subjective world is my consciousness. And there's also something called what it's like to be Ky. So what that is. Where it comes from is the big question. So to me, what is consciousness is to answer that, you have to answer those two questions.
What is it and where does it come from? There's a category of experiments with random number generators that I think can help people understand the mystery of consciousness. In this experiment, you have a a physical, random number generator, and this machine is producing a random string of ones and zeros.
You collect enough of this and you see that, sure enough, there's a 50 [00:08:00] 50 distribution of ones and zeros. Usually these are interpretations of something intrinsically random, like quantum events, and then you ask a participant to attempt to influence the output of that random number generator in one direction or another, using only their intention.
So they, they might pick more ones or they might pick more zeros, and then you collect the output of that. And at the end of the trial you see statistically what happened? Was there more ones or more? Zero as well. You can do this many times as many labs have, and you find that there is an anomalous relationship between the intention of the operator and the output of the random number generator.
So most famously, this experiment was done at the Princeton Para Lab by the then Dean of the engineering School, Robert John. That project led to something called the Global Consciousness Project, which was this idea of spreading random number generators around the world to see if we could measure. To see if they could measure, uh, something like global consciousness.
And this experiment is interesting to me [00:09:00] because it gets to the heart of what consciousness is, meaning we don't know, but it's doing things that's telling us something about it ontologically. If consciousness was just an illusion produced by the brain, why does it have this apparent influence relationship with something outside of the brain?
How in the world could it affect something outside of the body? Okay. Well then if it is affecting something outside of the body, maybe consciousness is like many people are starting to suspect something more intrinsic to the fabric of the physical universe. And if that's true, I. Then that means a number of things.
One of which is you can possibly build new technologies or explore this type of effect in ways that you never thought possible. So, uh, much of the, the work that I've been doing, uh, all, all of which is super playful, has been let's build random number generators into. Different types of things and see if we can show effects that are due to consciousness.
Ky Dickens: You know, is it true that the random number generators not just kind of measure that meaning in in the moment, but can, can [00:10:00] predict something like there's a precognition to this global consciousness in which we find ourselves and, and especially like maybe you can reference 9/11?
Adam Curry: There seems to be this pre-cognitive or predictive quality.
To working with random number generators. The famous case, of course, is September 11th, so the global consciousness, random number generators started to show an effect a few hours before the first plane struck. So it was like there was a, a precognition, a pre sentiment of this event that was about to unfold.
We've seen this in my work with random number generators as well. One of my projects entangled is a mobile app that people can download that connects them to a quantum random number generator that's running for them 24 7. The purpose of this is to both advance the research in terms of site, but also to explore the idea that we might be able to tap into pre sentiment effects.[00:11:00]
So in other words, can we retrieve information about the future? By tapping into collective consciousness following some sort of standardized protocol. So what do you mean, Adam? By accessing information across time and space and predicting the future? Well, here's some examples of experiments that we're running right now.
We currently really don't have a good way of predicting earthquakes. It's just, it's a very chaotic system and, and the sensors aren't quite there yet. However, stories are replete of animals and, you know, even people having precognitive dreams of, of large natural disasters and earthquakes. So maybe we can tap into that intuition using random number generators and entangled to see if we can get effects that specifically are correlated with earthquakes and therefore make forecasts.
Another would be, let's say that you wanted to accelerate a discovery, accelerate some important scientific discovery, and, uh, you were looking for some sort of cancer cure and it's a cancer that might [00:12:00] involve. A particular gene, but there's 10,000 gene candidates, and where do you look? Well, maybe what you could do is feed those 10,000 gene candidates into the entangled network, have global consciousness or collective consciousness, sort of DAOs which ones are related to the cancer that you're looking for.
And point those investigators in the direction of, uh, where to look and, and in so doing, perhaps accelerate the discoveries. So these are the types of like far out, slightly ridiculous experiments that I'm interested in doing, but you know that that's, that characterizes any kind of moonshot project.
Ky Dickens: So what have you learned working with scientists like Dean Radin and Robert John around the relationship between consciousness and physical reality?
Adam Curry: Well, the one thing I've learned about the relationship between consciousness and physical reality is that it's not, it's not so easily reducible. We're, we're kind of [00:13:00] coming out of this morass of materialism in this sort of metaphysical framework that says that the only things that exist are physical things.
If it's not, if, if a phenomena is not currently explicable in terms of known physical things, then it's not real. It's an illusion That's almost certainly false. It, it's even kind of false, just logically. Like if it's an illusion, what's experiencing the illusion? You know, like, so it implies the existence of the thing that it's trying to argue against.
The world has really come around to that in, in the last 10 years. There's, there's kind of a, a, a springtime happening in, in the world of consciousness right now led by philosophy departments in, in universities around the world. There's dozens of theories on the nature of consciousness, the ones that seem to be sticking around or something like consciousness is somehow fundamental and biology is involved in some sort of dialogue with it.[00:14:00]
Biology might not be producing it, but it is decoding it. Somehow it's, it's maybe allowing it to shine through. A classic metaphor is something like a television set. If you're only looking at the screen of the tv, you think that the programming is being produced by the pixels and the tv, but the information's coming from invisible TV signals in the sky.
I think the. There's a couple of very good theories that are emerging too. Hammeroff and Penrose's Orch OR is looking very interesting.
Stuart Hammeroff is an anesthesiologist, and Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist. It might be a little scary for people to know that we don't really know.
How anesthesia works. We know that it works, but we don't really know how, or at least it's up for debate still. And so hammer off suggested that these physical structures in the cells called microtubules could actually be or function as some sort of quantum device, something that is because of its structure.
[00:15:00] Shape capable of connecting the cell to the fabric of the cosmos through quantum entanglement. And the idea there with the anesthesia is that the, the anesthesia somehow attenuates the ability of the microtubules to function, which acts as a dimmer switch to consciousness. So the human is still alive, but the lights upstairs go out.
It's really quite elegant. Um, the primary criticism to that until recently has been that the body is too warm and wet for quantum effects to persist long enough. And just the last year there was some modeling that showed that that's not, not quite true, or at least it's, it's showing that the, the effects can persist far longer than originally thought.
Ky Dickens: Yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, I'm, it's exciting to be alive right now and all that research is getting done. So, you know, you talked a little bit about intention, you know, I guess. You know, not to be repetitive, but I just think it's kind of important to drill in on this. Like how, how do you think intention or what it has, you know, the [00:16:00] research shown around intention and belief and how they impact the physical world.
Because that's something I've run into even with the non-speaking individuals and their, and, and their parents and teachers. We've talked about testing, telepathy was how important it's to believe in that, to be able to see it. And they're like, scientists can come. Yeah. But it's best if it's scientists who believe them.
And I was, I've always thought that was so. It always feels so suspect when you hear it and then you, I would love for you to talk to, is there a scientific basis for that?
Adam Curry: There's a deeper dimension to intention. Intention is something that is conscious. You're aware of it, but it doesn't seem that that's what's really driving the ship.
And by driving the ship, I mean, let's say that getting an effect on a random number generator or getting some sort of side effect telepathy or otherwise intention's important, but there's a lot more to it. You have to go down a level or two deeper than intention into the realm of the subconscious mind.
And what, what I mean by subconscious is the part of our psyche that exists and is operating things, but of which or not, or [00:17:00] very rarely aware consciously. Okay. It's, and it's, it's a bit of a hand waving on my part because we don't really know what the subconscious is. I personally believe that it is the subconscious that is connected somehow to.
The fabric of physical reality. In other words, it is somehow in the domain of the subconscious through which the information processing of psci or telepathy or PK is happening, and it bubbles up to the conscious mind. So in that subconscious realm, you also have deep-seated beliefs. And those deep-seated beliefs can be things like, I want side to be real, or I don't want side to be real.
I, I, I will be afraid if side effects show up. I'll be happy if Psi effects show up or sigh is totally normal or telepathy is totally normal. Or you know, these types of deep-seated psychological things of which we may or may not even be aware. And this, I believe, is where it's sort of the determining factor for [00:18:00] whether or not the anomalous effects show up.
One is meaning and the other is sort of like deep psychology stuff. So one might set an intention, which is good. The question is, is that intention actually aligned with deeper parts of your psyche? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That's something to sort of be aware of work to do. The problem gets trickier too when you're talking about doing scientific investigations because the experimenters also have, have a subconscious mind and also have internalized belief systems and also have, you know, meaning surrounding the outcome of events and so forth.
That can become confounds too in their ability to do things like proof studies, replications. It works both ways, so I, I don't know what to do about that. How do you shield against something like deep seated belief systems having an a, an effect on the outcome of the experiment or, or meaning having an effect on the outcome experiment?
I don't know. I think it's probably the first step though, is just to be aware of, of these types of things being confounds and [00:19:00] experiments. Intention is important. It's, it's not the only thing going on though.
Ky Dickens: Super interesting. It is quite a challenge to overcome that. So, but with that in mind, do you think that we can change an outcome in the past or future with our consciousness?
Adam Curry: Well, it seems like we can change outcomes with our, our consciousness somehow outcomes in the physical world. So we can change them in the present according to the pair work and others. You look at the random number generator, research outcomes change. Can we change things in the past maybe or in the future?
Maybe. And here's what I mean by that. There has been work that has has involved generating random number generator data, not looking at it. No one looks at it, waiting for a few weeks, and then having somebody from the point of view of the future. Send their intention to the, the quote unquote past to affect it, and it shows up as a significant effect.
And same with the future. So you can kind of do [00:20:00] these time delayed things. Similar stuff in, in the remote viewing cannon. If you think about it, this, this is like Adam being like weirdly metaphysical, I've never seen the future. I've never actually seen the past. I've only ever experienced and lived in the present moment.
So the past is something like an idea of the past that exists in the present moment, and that is consistent to the future. So it's, it's a consistent history to the present moment. And the future is like a probability of the present moment. It could be anything, but it's most likely gonna be what's most probable.
Right? It's, it's, it's guessable. So we have consistent histories and we have probable futures. On either side or the present moment. And so if you think that you're influencing the past or the present, maybe you're actually just influencing one of those two things in the present moment. You're changing the consistent history and you're changing the probable future.
I.
Ky Dickens: Just moving on to the Collective Consciousness app a little bit, could [00:21:00] you explain what that is and how it works and what role it's playing in the data collection process?
Adam Curry: The Collective Consciousness app, or entangled as it's called, is a, it's meant to be the next stage of site research, or my interpretation of the next stage of Psi research.
It's a mobile app that you download, and when you do that, you are connected to a stream of quantum bits, just, uh, a, we've got a laser set up that's producing random numbers, and we produce random numbers at a rate of one bit per second per user. So every user on the network is generating, like flipping a quantum bit once per second, 24 7.
All of this data is collected in a way that allows us to ask questions. To pose questions to each user and get answers, and the answers come in the form of the bits that are flipped by the users. So let's say that we're interested in predicting an earthquake. Will there be a large earthquake happening tomorrow?
Well, you can with [00:22:00] Entangled, you can pose that question to each user and say. If you think that there will be an earthquake tomorrow, flip the first bit of each hour, and then what we do is we collect that and if there's a significant effect, one way or the other, we register that as a yes or no prediction.
So in this way, we can advance Psi research and in ways that have have never been possible before in terms of its scale and in terms of its automation. Now this is sort of my attempt to bake into the research. A couple of key findings that we've learned over the decades, or at least that, that I've come to believe over the decades, and that is that consciousness has access to information across time and space.
That's thing one. Thing two is that it's all or mostly subconscious. So you want to, you wanna somehow get into the subconscious mind or, or evoke that somehow. Right. And, and most sort of divination or, or side practices or some form of trying to access information. The subconscious mind. Right. [00:23:00] And then there are some people who are very good.
Like everybody has the capability. It seems to be intrinsic to consciousness itself. Some people are very good. And I think that my opinion is that most people are good some of the time, and that feedback is important. So if you put all of that together, what you end up with is something like Entangled or the Collective Consciousness app.
It's actually, it's kind of like a protocol for doing Psi research or for attempting to access information across time and space. And it, it's, it's all automated by this computer system. It's an automated way of using random number generation posing questions and providing feedback to the user and measuring this statistically, that is what seems to be like the way to, to get useful or actionable insights about the future in ways that can help us accelerate discoveries.
Ky Dickens: So what do you think is the next big breakthrough in consciousness research? And are we close to achieving it?
Adam Curry: I believe that it's going to come from ai, but not in the way that people think. So the popular idea right now [00:24:00] is that AI is on a path to becoming conscious, right? Developing sentience, and then it's anyone's guess what happens.
I disagree with that. I think that AI is on a path of showing us what consciousness is not. And what I mean by that is it reveals the mystery. What consciousness is, it helps show how we humans and, and animals and insects and how biological life is. Special listeners will be familiar with something called the Turing Test.
The Turing test was developed 70 years ago, and it was supposed to be a benchmark to determine where we are in this stage of AI progress. And it, it is basically if a machine or like an AI is capable of simulating human behavior. Fooling a person into not knowing the difference between interacting with an authentic human and interacting with an ai, then it satisfied the Turing test.
Now we're there in a number of different ways we're there, right? And if we're not there, then [00:25:00] we're close. And at the same time, there's no reason to think that, you know, there's no good reason to think that the, that chat, GPT actually has consciousness, meaning is there subjectivity attendant to it? Does it have thoughts and feelings?
I think that the answer is no currently, but the problem is that as these AI systems become more and more like us, just in terms of resembling us, we have absolutely no way of knowing if it is conscious or not. In other words, what, how, what is there for us to know about whether or not this is a convincing simulation of a real person or actually the real thing, and we have no idea.
We have no way of testing that. What I, I've been working on for a few years is a, a proposition to solving that the Turing test was the test for the last 70 years. It will it be the test for the next 70 years. And I think the answer is no. And I propose that we look towards parapsychology to develop the next test.
So [00:26:00] what I'm calling t is basically an approach to evaluating machines and AI in terms of their ability to do telepathy to respond to the future. Remember how we were talking about the anomalous pre sentiment response? Seems like, you know, it seems like biological life itself has an adaptive advantage to respond to unpredictable future events.
Well, maybe the machines do too. So can you develop a test that could evoke that, that possibility or assess that potential in the machine? Meaning if it, if the AI or the machine reacts to an unpredictable. Future event in a way that is meaningful to it, meaning it, there's some sort of incentive structure, penalty or award system, something like that, and it performs at a level equivalent to what we know of humans.
Well then it's, it's demonstrated something really interesting. You can have all of the computer processing power in the world, but if you can't operate telepathically, like basic humans and, and animals can, then you, you're, [00:27:00] you're not yet sharing in that divine sparks that makes us special. But if we can develop a test that's sensitive to that, you know, a, a new heuristic for the new century, then we can start to this path of, of knowing ontologically what's really going on with the machines as they approach something like consciousness.
Ky Dickens: You know, when you think maybe 50 years in the future though, right? I mean, we've been like kind of like marred in materialism for so long. Do you think We truly are moving our way into a post materialist, you know, paradigm in terms of science. And that like we will look back in 50, a hundred years and think of the like Materialists hanging on with their fingernails right now will feel like flat Earthers.
Adam Curry: Dean Radin has a funny take on this. He says, first they ignore you, then they fight you, and then they say, you were right. And I knew it all along. I guess what's what's happening is the incentive structure is changing for scientists. There's this great phrase in the Bitcoin world that says, everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve.
So Bitcoin's been around for a long time, right? [00:28:00] In the very beginning, if you were early, like if you're really innovative, you had the opportunity to buy it cheap. However, if you didn't read the white paper and you didn't understand it and you dismissed it, or maybe you even attacked it, you said It's magic, internet money, it'll never work.
All these things. Basically, there's an opportunity cost there for arrogance and for being too close-minded. I think something like that is true for anomalies. Research in general. There's an opportunity cost for ignoring this stuff, but there's also an incentive structure for the innovative people, particularly in the academic world, to pick this stuff up because the formative ideas for the next century or however long the sort of like next phase is gonna be or developing now, there's immense opportunities for new discoveries and for new ideas and theories.
And I think that's happening in the academic world right now, and we're replacing this sort of like moribund anachronistic perspective on the world [00:29:00] with something much more exciting.
Ky Dickens: I don't, I don't think I've asked you this. Can you talk about like what the mind lamp is and how it demonstrates mind matter interaction?
Adam Curry: So the mind lamp is something that. My friends and I, we, we have this little company called Cyron. It still exists anyway, it came out of the para lab. Mind lamp is a light that is sort of like a desk lamp, and it can change its color based on what the random number generator inside is doing. So it glows a normal white color when statistically there's no anomalies.
However, if it detects that. There's an influence happening, could be chance, or it could be due to the influence of your consciousness, then it will, it will start to change a color and it will randomly pick what color to change to. So what you can do is you can think, I want to change it to blue now from white, and then you execute whatever strategy you'd like to try to influence the thing and watch it turn whatever [00:30:00] color it becomes.
So we've been making mind lamps for, I don't know, 13, 14 years or something like that. And it, it really does work, particularly the first few times that, that people do it when they're approaching it playfully. And, you know, you'll, they'll, they'll come up to it and they say, what's this like, oh, it's a mind lamp.
Think of a color, and they'll think of pink or something, and then it'll turn pink over the course of. 10 or 20 seconds, and of course they'll be a little bit blown away and have a lot of questions. How did you do that? It's like, oh, I don't know.
Ky Dickens: That's funny though, that when people are being playful, it's, it's more likely to work and when they get really serious about it, it's not as effective.
Is that correct?
Adam Curry: Yeah. I mean it's, it's very much like any other skill. If you are, if you're trying too hard, you kind of fumble yourself. Uh, but if you're having fun, often you can enter, you enter flow more easily to put it one way.
Ky Dickens: So. I always get asked this, right? It's like, are there negative consequences to this?
And you know, I know there's a lot of baseline and Julia Moss Bridge and a lot of people talk about the basis of love or play like we were just talking [00:31:00] about in inci abilities that they manifest best and, and the nonspeakers will say this all the time. It, it works best with good vibes, right? Or good energy or people that I love or that type of thing.
But have you seen, or have there ever been any studies around people using consciousness and intention to like. Win at gambling, you know, or other chance based activities.
Adam Curry: So the way that I come down on that is it's probably like your ability to, to do something, quote unquote negative with si is probably mitigated by how you relate to it.
Meaning if you think that that is bad, you ain't, you ain't gonna do it most likely. But if you, if you're pretty much neutral to these things, or maybe if you have some sort of like positive association to a particular outcome, then you're likely gonna get it. So kind of like what we were discussing before, the anomalies accumulate around a meaningfulness in the experiment that, that that's true as well for somebody that might have mal intentions.
Ky Dickens: Yeah.
Adam Curry: It's so interesting.
Ky Dickens: You know, I think [00:32:00] one thing that has started to bubble up a lot in the consciousness world, or it's the people studying consciousness, is this idea that we live in some sort of simulation. You know, where do you fall on that and what does that mean for consciousness research if we do
Adam Curry: So, the simulation argument, which is, you know, the physical reality is something like a rendered video game is very useful for understanding consciousness appropriately.
Meaning, I think it's a, it's an analogy that people understand, oh, you mean I'm playing the video game character, but I'm real on the other side of the video game? It's like, yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about with consciousness. So I'm sympathetic to it from that point of view. I, I think that it's kind of like not really falsifiable and, uh, an, an advanced enough video game would be the same as the kind of physics that we're seeing of the world anyway.
Presumably, you know, like a, a video game would be composed of ones and zeros. The computer code really, that's like quantized in the, in the way that quantum physics is as well. [00:33:00] So maybe you're talking about the same thing. One thing that I do like about the simulation argument, I think this is like my best.
It's really positive in the sense that it suggests that you can do things that you don't think that you can do. You're kind of maybe limited by your own belief systems or maybe by some sort of like consensus belief systems in which you currently find yourself. And I think I, I find that very, very empowering and like very playful.
If you think that you might be in a simulation or you live in the matrix, the next question is how do you wake up from the matrix or how do you bend the rules? It's always good for people to ask themselves that. I think you don't wanna be, whether or not this is real or a simulation, I don't think you want to be totally bought into it.
Not too much.
Ky Dickens: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's weird. I, you know, there's been that researcher on, they were able to teleport, right? What was it? The small, like a, not a proton that. Anyway, it started, just started making me thinking like, oh my gosh, is this gonna be a reality one day where we can like be, be more consciousness [00:34:00] somewhere and travel and you know, play in that way, which is so wild to think about.
Adam Curry: Interesting cousins, and those cousins are things like UAP research or spontaneous remission or energy systems. All of these really cool things that there's some reason to think that there's something there, right? That by exploring them, we might be on the precipice of uncovering advanced new, amazing technologies and a pathway for understanding the mechanisms behind these things.
Finally, and that could get us to the Jetsons world. You know, I, I think it's no accident that the consciousness research stuff is often brought up in relation to the UAP stuff. It's because they're, you know, they're. They're cousins in the anomalies, but I think it's maybe in order to explain either of them, you're gonna need to think about reality a little bit differently.
Ky Dickens: Totally. Absolutely. Okay. And then, you know, if your work succeeds in connecting humanity to a deeper consciousness level, like what [00:35:00] kind of societal transformations do you hope to see?
Adam Curry: I've grappled with that question. Here's why. Because at some level I think we all know that it's important, but why? That that why is, I mean, the knee-jerk responses are, well, if people knew they were all connected to each other, the world would be a better place.
Like we treat each other differently. Would we? I would hope so. I, I think that it, it's maybe a couple of things. One is anomalies are clues. By, by following the threads of these clues, the consciousness stuff and, and all the other anomalies, it's going to lead to technology breakthroughs, which is going to lead to peace because I believe that it's a solution out of a lot of the problems that the world faces.
Problems of scarcity, problems of ill health, of people not having enough. I, I think that we need those types of new breakthrough scientific ideas and breakthrough technologies to, to, to get us over the hump. That the world is more peaceful as a result. The second thing [00:36:00] is I think that there's, there's a kind of a distinction you could draw between facts and truth.
Facts would be, for example, peer reviewed research suggests that telepathy is real. Peer reviewed research selects that psycho kinetic effects or precognition is, is real and so forth. Those are facts, but truth has this meaning dimension to it. Truth, I think, is. How you react to those facts, it's, it's something that changes you.
You feel it, right? You, you are, you are somehow changed by this. Either you understand the world more clearly or it helps dissolve just a little bit of illusion that existed in inside of you, and it, it helps orient you to something. Something new and powerful and we can feel it. And so what these frontier scientists are doing is they're producing facts.
And what I think the I, I think is going on is that we're looking at those and we're sensing the, the truth in it. We're reacting to the truth in it. And what to do about it is up to each individual. [00:37:00] How does that change you? How do you react to differently to that? How does that affect your value system or your decision making or where you choose to spend your time or focus or, or, or what you advocate for?
Uh, and that's not for me to decide for individuals. Um, it can't be, uh, that's, that's to be experienced by, by each person.
Ky Dickens: That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks. But new episodes will now be released every other Sunday, so stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads. Even the veiled ones that knit together our reality.
Please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Original music was created by Elizabeth PW, original logo and cover art by Ben Kandoraa design. The audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma, our amazing podcast coordinator, Jil Pasiecnik, The Telepathy Tapes coordinator in my right hand, Katherine Ellis.
And I'm Ky Dickens, your writer, creator, and host. Thank you again for joining [00:38:00] us.
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